Steve Cote: Seattle TNT: An awesome night for startups and entrepreneurs

Yesterday we hosted our first Seattle Tech-N-Tell, an event where six startups showed their products to more than 230 people, most of them entrepreneurs or pre-entrepreneurs. The house was packed, the energy was high.

Thoughtful.co took home the first Dynamite Award for most innovative product, which included a 1-year free subscription to Garvey Schubert Barer AdviceOnline service, 3-month of free banner advertising on Seattle 2.0, several great books, but above all, they took home the Dynamite Award plaque with all the bragging rights that come with it.

There were two things that I enjoyed quite a bit about the event. First, the crowd was outstanding. There were a lot of new entrepreneurs, people considering becoming entrepreneurs, angel investors, and some of the ‘old’ folks as well. Usually I go to these events and I see the same faces over and over, but at Seattle TNT last night about 75% were not the usual suspects. I read this as a sign the tech startup community in Seattle is expanding, and that’ll benefit everyone.

The second great thing from last night was the outstanding job the presenters did demoing their products. I was blown away. I know this will sound way too biased because I have a reputation at stake (since I organized the event), but you can ask anyone else who attended what they thought. They were all very prepared and polished (although we had technical issues, which is always fun).

Don’t take my word for it, go to Twitter and search for “SeattleTNT” and “Seattle TNT”.

I have to thank the team at The Crocodile who were very pleasant to work with and went all the way to help us be successful; Garvey Schubert Barer for consistently supporting Seattle 2.0; Lyndi Thompson for helping with many of the tasks of pulling TNT together, Kyle Kesterson for the awesome logo and site branding and Forrest Corbett for the pictures. But most important of them all, it’s the attendees and the presenting startups that made the event an amazing success!

Now, to the startups…

GlobalMojo (Free Giving Playground)

Before the event I know GlobalMojo was about helping non-profits make money through some kind of browser extension, but I didn’t know exactly how it worked. It’s pretty awesome because you don’t have to do anything, almost, to give money to non-profits. Daniel Todd, the CEO, explained you just install a browser plug-in, select your non-profit and configure a few things and you are good to go. Now the non-profit of your choice starts to make money! Well, they make money as long as you buy things online. If you go to Google and search for products or services, a little icon will appear next to results that will generate revenue to your non-profit. Also, if you go to specific e-commerce sites (the example was Hotels.com), a little yellow bar appears on the top of the browser saying something like “2.5% of your purchases go to XYZ non-profit”. It doesn’t cost you anything. You don’t have to fill any form. There is nothing extra to do, just what you used to do before. Pretty awesome, uh?

Venpop (Wishpot)

Wishpot has been for a long time cracking the social shopping experience. In that process, they learned quite a bit about Facebook and social media, which probably inspired them to create Venpop. The idea is very simple (and powerful). If you have a small business (I’m sure it works for big businesses as well) and you sell products online, you use Venpop to integrate your e-commerce website into Facebook, basically creating a new online store inside of Facebook on your Fan Page. Not only that, but they provide some pretty sophisticated analytics tool to show what products are being more popular or not. Tom Lianza, the CTO, did a great job showing the value proposition. I know this is hard to grasp if you are not on this world, but I spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out online marketing strategies for small business, and I simply don’t touch e-commerce because the tools and services and the whole billing / inventory / CRM is just too complex. Venpop is the future of Yahoo Stores!

Memetales

The last time I saw Maya Bisineer presenting Memetales was a year or so ago (probably more). To be honest I don’t remember well what it was back then, but it didn’t impress me. It was a very small idea to help bring kids books online. Yesterday I had some starred eyes on her demo. It was amazing to see how a publisher could convert the PDF of a book they had into a dynamic, interactive, multi-media e-book that works on the web, on the iPhone and on the iPad. It was very nicely integrated and done. No question this is a hard business to crack (it’s not like book publishers are interested in cannibalizing their print business), but the product is impressive.

Optify

Let me start by saying Optify is not for everyone. It’s not a consumer product and it’s not for every business, but on my previous startup (Sampa) we spent at least 8-16 man-hours a week doing what we could have done in 15-minutes with Optify. I’m sure you heard about SEO and SEM (Search Engine Marketing). Optify gives you the tools and reports for you to make sense of your online Search Engine marketing. It’ll give you reports of how well you are ranking on Google for certain keywords. It will tell you how to optimize your online campaign expenses to maximize returns. It will help figure out how well you are converting visitors into customers over time. It’s fantastic if you are selling things online, but also if you use your website as a tool to drive new business. Erez Barak, the co-founder and VP of Product, did some pretty impressive demo using the Seattle TNT to show what his service is capable of, including some brand new features around Twitter. I’m a sucker for analytics and online marketing. Optify had me at “tracking”!

Thoughtful.co (winner!)

Thoughtful.co was the winner of the Dynamite Award for most innovative product as voted by the attendees. It was actually an easy win for them since pretty much everyone on that room could relate to the problem they were trying to solve. They make it easier for you to find gifts for others. Not impressed? Neither was I when I heard about it the first time. Then I learned they use information about who you want to buy a gift to from their Facebook profile (assuming they are your friends on Facebook). Ok, now it’s getting interested, but it sounds too obvious. Lots of social shopping experience will be like that. But they took one step further, and through some well-known psychological methodology, they guide you through a series of pair of images and ask you to pick each one most describe the person you are buying the gift to. No need to say the example they gave is how to buy a gift for your wife. Chris Lynch, the founder and CEO, started clicking on those images and explaining how his wife like more of this than that (the images were not of products, but of lifestyles) and the product suggestions on the left changed to become even more relevant to his wife. It was pretty amazingly done and the UI looked really good.

iSheetMusic

I don’t play the guitar, but I have a lot of friends who do. Maybe it’s because I’m Brazilian, and so are a lot of the people I know who play the guitar, but they carry around a bag full of magazines and books with sheet music. If we are going to have a party at someone’s house (and that’s a Brazilian party that starts at noon and ends at 3am with just the ‘closest’ 45 friends) it’s always a hassle for them to carry those bags of sheet music and then to find the one magazine that has that one song. Anyway, those times are nearly over. As Matthew Sutton, the COO and founder said, if you carry your music on your iPod and iPad, why not carry your sheet music? Duh! iSheetMusic is launching an iPhone and iPad app that allows you to buy and manage all your sheet music. The app is pretty simple (because it doesn’t have to be complicated) but it works well scaling the sheet music for the right device and orientation, provides zoom-pinch, pagination and once you are in “play mode” it automatically moves the sheet for you, like it should.